Page 6 of Until the End of Ever
My directions were met with nods and grunts of assents.
We’d been messing with forces beyond my comprehension. Had I truly believed we’d encounter them, would I have led us here? At least, we had some sort of a plan this time.
And Kleos. We also had Kleos.
After all this time, I could put a word to what I’d sensed at first glance. A word that explained everything. Of course, she was a goddess. An untrained ticking bomb, without any clue of the extent of her powers. Frankly, I felt like an idiot for not seeing it before.
“Two by sea,” I heard, as the ground beneath our feet kept shaking.
I turned on my heels towards the eerie voice.
By the grace of the gods, nothing had jumped out of the pit this time, but the fact that the next disruption came from within our group was equally worrying.
“Five beyond death, and seven to rise as all the walls fall.” The words came out of Silver’s mouth, but it wasn’t her—she sounded too calm, her voice low, resonating around the cave walls.
I took steps towards her, and saw that her usual silver eyes were entirely pitch black.
Fuck, this wasn’t good.
“A new goddess shall stand or descend by the grace of the one who judges all,”she continued tonelessly, serene as ever.
And then, Silver shook her head, eyes back to normal, though blinking rapidly. “What in the sevenhellswas that?”
She could say that again.
“Are you all right?” I checked.
From what I’d read, receiving prophecies was highly dangerous.
“I think so?” The petite woman wrinkled her nose. “But fuck, it’s like someone was shouting inside my head. And I have the taste of dirt at the back of my mouth.”
She grimaced in distaste.
“If that’s the only side effect, consider yourself lucky.” I opted not to tell her what had been known to happen to some of the pythias I’d read about. Spontaneous combustion, eyeballs melted away, madness, and worse. “Sit,” I demanded, patting my breast pocket for the supplies I’d prepared. “And take a moment to breathe.”
The fact she didn’t protest demonstrated that she was more shaken than she’d admitted. It was the second time we’d properly met, but I got the impression that Silver was the kind of woman who argued everything, especially with the likes of me.
Kleos rushed to her friend, one hand flying to her head.
I’d packed the essentials, shrinking them to portable proportions. Undoing my spell with a wave of my hand to return the Fortnum and Mason back to its real size, I offered Silver one of the six bottle of waters in the basket.
“Drink slowly. We ought to rest for a while.”
The next bottle, I handed to Kleos, before passing the rest down to everyone else.
We were no longer in imminent danger, so I did my utmost best not to look at her.
I couldn’t afford to. I’d made the decision to put some distance between us, and if I was supposed to stick to it, looking was out of the question. So was thinking about her. Or her mouth. What she could do with it. Or the sound she made when she?—
Nuh-uh. No thinking.
I also couldn’t afford to remember when she saidthose words, winding the wheels of fate with her voice.
Iwas seven when my grandfather sat me down, and started to make me read the text, one word at a time, over several weeks, demanding that I never said, wrote, or so much asthoughtthem all in one go.
“Out of the mouth of a mere mortal, these words might be unwise. To this day, the moment they’re spoken, Moros himself stops writing and listens.”
“Moros?” I’d asked.
